Local is not second-rate in this joyous variety show
SA’s comedians have a knack for pointing out our country’s failings, quirks and foibles in a way that makes us laugh at ourselves and yet at the same time feel a kind of patriotic pride.
So when Marc Lottering regaled his audience with an impression of a gay hippopotamus on the loose in Grassy Park, we were all delighted — even though the premise of his story was one of national embarrassment.
Lottering was mortified that Scar the hippo made his escape from Rondevlei Nature Reserve on the same day that a group of international musical theatre stars arrived in the country; this seemed to confirm all the worst clichés about SA being a place where there are wild animals walking down the streets.
The stars had come from Broadway and the West End to perform in Finding the Light ,a variety show staged in support of the Kolisi Foundation, with Lottering as its MC. The brainchild of SA-UK couple Jessica Ross and David Habbin, Finding the Light is a fantastic initiative to raise funds and awareness to tackle interrelated social issues: poverty and hunger, community safety, and trauma and mental health.
Habbin is a celebrated tenor. Apart from being the most famous rugby player on the planet, Siya Kolisi is also an enthusiastic (if faulty) singer. So it was obvious at the outset that this partnership would focus on song. Ross and Habbin’s idea for “maybe 300 people and a pianist in a hall somewhere” developed into a stage extravaganza running in Artscape’s opera house for a week of sold-out performances.
Readers of this column will know that I am a pushover when it comes to musicals. Make me laugh, make me cry, do it through song and a little bit of dance, and I will love you forever. You can imagine how giddy with excitement I was listening to numbers from Phantom, Les Mis, Guys and Dolls, Dear Evan Hansen, Annie, Into the Woods, Sunset Boulevard, West Side Story and more, belted out by the finest musical talent one could imagine, accompanied by the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Brandon Phillips and a chorus comprising students from Cape Town’s musical theatre academies.
But here’s the thing. The singers who enthralled me had no obvious national identity. Much as I was wowed by the performances of the “international” stars (joining Habbin in this category were Kim Criswell, Nikki Renée Daniels and Michael Xavier), it did not occur to me that I should be more impressed by them than I was by the equally brilliant “local” cast members (Jonathan Roxmouth, Lynelle Kenned, Tshepo Ncokoane and Lucy Tops).
I don’t mind Lottering hamming up the distinction between home and abroad, of course. It would be churlish not to laugh at a joke about the stellar cast being assembled from London, New York and ... Mowbray. Still, I do wonder if underlying the comic bathos there is not a hint of colonial cringe the inferiority complex causing South Africans to believe that everything is better if it comes from overseas, that “local is lekker” actually means making peace with being second-rate.
We shouldn’t have to boast that our musical theatre talent is as good as the best in the world. It shouldn’t be worth writing about; it should just be taken for granted. And yet, judging by responses to Finding the Light, many people remain happily surprised to discover this truth.
Indeed, even the most gifted SA theatre producers and promoters would be hardpressed to fill a 1,500-seat auditorium night after night without appealing to their prospective audience members’ deep-seated insecurities.
“Stars from the West End and Broadway” is a billing that sells tickets. But the difference between the musicals I’ve seen in SA over the past two decades and those on offer in London and New York is not one of quality. It’s more a question of variety and scale both of which are sustained by a market that encourages private investment in the performing arts, as well as public expenditure to enable this.
You know how Kolisi’s Springboks are world champions? It’s like that with SA’s musical theatre stars too.